Muscle memory is a feature you do not own

An app I have used for years finally got an update. Genuinely years. I had assumed it was abandoned.

Two things happened in that update. They moved to a subscription, three dollars a year, which is roughly nothing and obviously fair for something I open most days. And they redesigned the interface.

I was pleased about the first one and I am still annoyed about the second, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out that these were separate complaints.

The subscription cost me three dollars. The redesign cost me something I had built up over years without noticing: the ability to use the thing without looking at it. My thumb knew where to go. It went there for years. Now it goes to the wrong place, and every time it does I get a small jolt of being made newly incompetent at something I had been good at since roughly 2019.

That is the part nobody prices. When you redesign a product, you are not just changing how it looks. You are deleting an investment your users made, without telling them they were making it, and without asking whether they wanted to spend it again.

And the bill lands unevenly. Somebody who opens the app twice a year notices nothing. They had no muscle memory to lose. The person who paid the most is the person who used it the most, which means a redesign is, structurally, a tax on loyalty. The better a customer you were, the more it costs you.

I am not arguing that interfaces should never change. I design them, I would be out of a job, and plenty of my own work has done this to people. Software that never moves is dead software, and some redesigns genuinely repay the cost within a week.

I am arguing that the cost is real, that it is currently invisible in every process I have worked in, and that almost nobody in the room is accounting for it when the new mockups go up. “Users will adapt” is true and is not the same as “this is free”.

The version of this I would actually like to see: when you move something, leave the old gesture working for a while. Let the hands catch up on their own schedule. It is not hard. It is just not anybody’s job.